Customers and merchants generally desire convenient and secure means for performing financial and other related transactions. Assets such as credit cards, debit cards, pre-paid cards, gift cards, coupons, etc. are all examples of the increasingly “virtualized” nature of currency. Specifically, rather than actually exchanging physical currency or physical coupons for goods and/or services, the transaction is performed with, e.g., an account number or “proxy” account number (e.g., one created for purposes of processing the transaction at the point-of-sale, yet which is not an actual credit or debit account number), and the funds are credited/debited electronically.
Unfortunately, for reasons described in more detail herein, existing solutions for distributing these assets are inefficient and prone to failure. For example, a virtual wallet paradigm can be based on pre-existing accounts; and in order to perform a monetary transaction, a user of a client device must have a pre-existing account with a wallet service, (e.g., a trusted entity that provides an accounting database associated with the wallet), or have already pre-paid the wallet service. Additionally, existing assets are not “fungible”, and are dedicated for a specific use when they are created.
As customers and merchants have steadily evolved in transactional complexity and/or convenience (including the increasingly pervasive use of mobile devices), new and improved schemes for distributing assets are needed. Ideally, such solutions should offer reasonable and convenient management capabilities for customers, merchants and issuing entities, without compromising the flexibility of assets.